Hard Lives, Easy Targets

It's Tough To Avoid The Roving Packs Of `Jits,' Teens Who Often Attack Just For Malicious Fun

January 22, 2006|By David Fleshler and Michael Turnbell Staff Writers and Researcher Jeremy Milarsky contributed to this report.

At 4:30 a.m. on Fort Lauderdale's Himmarshee Street, the bars go dark and the last customers trudge toward a waiting row of cabs. Alphonso Harris starts looking for a place to sleep.

His bed will be a hard seat on a Broward County Transit bus. Since the murder and videotaped beating of homeless people a week and a half ago, he stays awake at night. After sunrise he pays $2.50 for an all-day bus pass and nods off in relative security.

Beatings on the street are common. Packs of teenagers -- the homeless call them "jitterbugs" or "jits" -- roam the city on bicycles and pelt homeless people with rocks and bottles. They pounce on them as they sleep, sometimes for money, sometimes for the sheer malicious joy of hurting someone.

Standing in a gravel parking lot across from Fat Cat's on Himmarshee, Harris says he was attacked by a "bunch of jitterbugs on bicycles" in Delevoe Park.

"I got hit in the head," said Harris, 43, who blamed his homelessness on marijuana, beer and crack. "About 15 of them on bicycles with sticks and bottles. Just senseless. They got about four or five of us, chased us out of the park. We had to run for our lives."

To get through the night safely, many homeless people sleep in groups, huddling together in parks, near railroad tracks or around the overpasses and entrance ramps of Interstate 95. Others find havens such as the alley off Northwest Seventh Avenue, near two gas stations that provide a steady supply of people to ask for handouts. Dark and forbidding, the alley is a place for people who are unwanted anywhere else.

"This is the only place the law, the authorities, will let us stay," says Eddie Johnson, 60, with a gray beard and a blue baseball cap.

If the police leave them alone, teenagers don't.

"There's a problem with young jits coming through on bikes, throw bottles at us," says Sam, 46, seated by the fire escape for an Elks club, which forms one wall of the alley, as the last rush-hour drivers head west on Broward Boulevard. "Just for laughs. We can't lay down anywhere. Can't sleep. Somebody has to stay up and watch."

"I used to sleep in the alley, now I don't," says Sam, who would not give his last name. "I try to find an abandoned car to sleep in or an abandoned building."

As for the attacks, he says, "We don't really tell the police because we don't want trouble."

Scott Russell, a part-time Fort Lauderdale police officer who works with the homeless, acknowledged that "jits" -- street-slang for kids -- throw things at homeless people. "It's been going on for years," he said. "They pick up rocks and throw them, and then run off laughing."

The two-paychecks myth

Estimates of the number of homeless people in Broward County run from 3,000 to 10,000 -- a range resulting from the notorious difficulty of counting them and from varying statistical methods. Most are temporarily without housing -- a woman fleeing an abusive husband, a man who lost his job and lacked savings, a family evicted from their home.

About 20 percent are classified as chronic homeless, the hard-core street people who have drug, alcohol or mental-health problems and have spent at least a year without permanent shelter.

A survey last year found 442 people living on the streets. The remaining 2,672 had beds in various shelters, generally in the county's eastern cities. Of the homeless overall, two-thirds are male, half are white, 37 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.

While the chronic and temporarily homeless appear to have little in common, they tend to share a lack of social support, an absence of family members to whom they can turn, said Steve Werthman, administrator of Broward County's Homeless Initiative Partnership.

"There is a myth that used to go around that everyone is two paychecks away from being homeless," he said. "If most people were to lose their income, there is a social safety net for them to fall back on. Homeless people, for any variety of reasons, are at the other extreme of that."

Social workers argue about whether housing or substance-abuse treatment is the key to keeping people off the street, Werthman said.

"Either one of them in isolation is ineffective," he said. "We're not going to be able to prevent homelessness without affordable housing. By the same token, we need treatment and other services to help them maintain that housing and lead healthier lives."

Always in danger of attack

At 3 a.m. on Sistrunk Boulevard, a powerful streetlight illuminates a bus bench where Carl Anderson folds women's clothes into a shopping cart.

The blouses and dresses represent the day's take from trash bins. Stashed in eight other carts are salvaged clothing, vacuum cleaners, bread makers, can openers and other items he sells on the street.

A friendly man with a salt-and-pepper beard, Anderson moved from Chicago to Fort Lauderdale as part of a magazine-selling scheme that left him in debt to the company. Then came drugs. "No one ever beat the crack monster," he says.